love, truth, beauty: here, now

Love

Wow. Must’ve been channelling cat, because I coughed up a hairball yesterday. Funny as my family is my husband and our four dogs from whom I learned love in all its soft vulnerability, fierce tenderness, raw true presence and daring.

Truth: I, like many of you, have at least two very disparate ways of interacting with the world. Truth: We are all one. Truth: I struggle with how these previous two truths synthesize.

Level One: I struggle with how my Paramedic life and My Yoga Teacher life co-exist. The switching from nights to days, the different people I hang out with, the differing paces and goals in my information gathering and personal interactions. I struggle with finding one that underlies both personnae, with switching from the intricacies of one to the other.

Level Two: I struggle with how to comprehend my sameness with very particular people who are very particularly striving to attack, demean and harm me, even while I am doing what I can to ensure their near-term safety so they have a long-term chance at all and they don’t harm the chances of all the others in the vicinity who are, according to the dictum above, one with both of us.

Level Another: I struggle with the feelings left over when I get home and wriggle out of my uniform. The feelings I know do not represent the truth directly, but are visceral, undeniable and real. The feelings of dirtiness after having been verbally attacked, the feelings of sadness for the person writhing and screaming, or the one simply spewing venomously while I bandage, evaluate and treat. The feelings of aggression and the not pretty wishes I use in the moment to defend against the feelings from being attacked, physically and verbally. The horribleness of having to restrain someone to prevent them from harming themselves or someone else.

So, where’s the love? On the mat. The love is the glue, the love is underlying, unnameable embracing beingness. The love is that all this goes on in a single consciousness. The love is the ability to weep it all out, to collapse out of a heart opening backbend into tears in balasana and to rise into virabhadrasana. To turn it all upsidedown in sirsasana or to fall on my face from some new permutation of bakasana.

The love is to walk into a classroom feeling so fragile, so near tears and so lost and half an hour later to be so engrossed is witnessing other people’s changes.

Maybe the love is to put the uniform on again, not knowing what the call will be. I’ll let you know.

Right now, the love is the mat.

Peace, disorder, embrace and witness. May these all be yours, all be mine, all the time. Out.